Book Cover

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I worked with Humanity in Action (HIA) to produce a book cover for their latest publication, a compilation of essays from participants from the 2014 Diplomacy and Diversity Fellowship. HIA were looking for something that would be slightly different from what they’ve had in the past, while also retaining some brand identity elements, such as their signature double arrows. HIA has in the past used a lot of blue for their publications, so this was also something we wanted to do differently.

I came up with an initial plain white background to see how things would work space-wise, and took some time to come up with a few fonts and colour schemes that worked well. I wanted a bold san serif font that wouldn’t look too squashed or crowded for the main title since there is a lot of text. Here I’ve used Abadi MT Condensed Extra Bold for the main title, and Seravek for the subtitle:

I’d also extracted a ribbon pattern made from the arrows to give some texture to the page, and played around with the positioning and colour so that it doesn’t impact the legibility of the text. The HIA logo, usually black and red on a white background, is instead converted to grey, scaled down, and positioned in the lower right corner to provide some branding without distracting too much from the title.

As you can see in the final image below, there were also other considerations to consider: barcode, blurb text and author names, spine. While we finally decided upon the darker red background and light pink ribbon, the design went through many stages.

Here are some of the other options I played around with:

For this option, I found an ampersand I liked, converted text to shape, and worked on refining the curve and shape to fit the Abadi text. It’s not perfect, but at this stage I just wanted to get an idea of what the cover would look like as a whole without investing too much time into one small element.

While I like the ampersand idea, the cover above seems too plain without the ribbon so I added it back in for cover on the left. Here I’m also utilizing the | symbol to separate author names, which I prefer over using bullets. For the option on the right, I quite liked how the colour of the ampersand helped unify the light beige background with the navy blue text, but HIA was more keen on a darker background colour.

This option combines the ribbon with a torn pattern look at the bottom. Right now it looks like there’s too much going on with the overlapping in the bottom left, but I think with more time and some tweaking this version might have worked out pretty nicely.